Letter from New York

Cheer and Loathing in New York

Grappling with powerful public images—Hillary Clinton by trying to remake hers, Rudy Giuliani by reinforcing his—New York’s Senate candidates are running psyche-to-psyche. They share a combative mix of arrogance and insecurity that is only fueled by the hatred they inspire in their enemies.

Tonight is Rudy’s night. It is the annual New York spectacle known as the Inner Circle, where reporters skewer the mayor in cute, amateurish skits, and Hizzoner has the chance for rebuttal with his own skit. Since nobody upstages Rudolph Giuliani, his will be a Broadway-class show, perhaps his final bravura performance before November 2000, when he hopes to be turned out of the mayor’s office by virtue of his election to the United States Senate.

Rudolph Giuliani and Hillary Clinton have turned the New York Senate race into both grand opera and soap opera. Illustration by Risko.

This evening, however, the ravening city media corps is not his chief target. Instead, it is Hillary, formerly Hillary Clinton. The two have been circling each other with the wary menace of prizefighters in the opening round, but it’s been a year now, and still they have not been in the same room. Tonight’s spectacle at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan has drawn an unusually large crowd, 1,300, including pooh-bahs representing every fissure in New York’s unstable political ground. They are all packed into the grand ballroom, hoping to witness the combatants touch gloves for the first time.

Enter the First Lady, looking like Cleopatra in full regalia, gowned to the floor in a pyramidal coatdress of black satin. Her neck is girdled in a collar of jewels. Her golden hair, swept high, shimmers. Most often, the whispers in her wake these days are beautiful. This is a woman who for many of her 52 years never cared a fig about her appearance, but in the chrysalis of transformation from political wife to independent woman, the jawline has been chiseled, the dominatrix eyebrows weeded, the weight dropped, and the result is a woman who obviously enjoys for the first time being called beautiful. Three old birds, Democratic regulars who refer to themselves as jaded, admitted after seeing Hillary speak in a suburb of New York, as one of them put it, “We weren’t prepared to be impressed, and we are impressed. First, the physical package. The polish. I would kill to get ahold of her hairdresser and makeup person. Kill.”

When the New York press corps first asked Hillary to their show, her spokesman Howard Wolfson misunderstood and insisted that she perform. He was told no, this was the mayor’s show. When she was invited by Mortimer Zuckerman, a personal friend and co-publisher of the New York Daily News, it became for Hillary a command appearance. Tonight, swanning across the ballroom floor with Zuckerman, she stops behind the back of Mayor Giuliani’s chair. And then, just as boldly as she did 30 years before when she walked the length of the Yale Law School library to dazzle Bill Clinton with a forthright introduction, the woman who is now perhaps the most famous in the world taps the 107th mayor of New York on the shoulder. He scrambles to his feet. She politely introduces herself. First round, Hillary.

Tonight is yet another rite of passage for Mrs. Clinton. A woman of grand ambition whose original choice was to channel her political aspirations through her naturally gifted husband, she is stumbling through the learning stage of candidacy for elective office. No out-of-town tryouts. She’s opening in New York.

For the first half of the interminable evening she watches the press show, Livin’ la Rudy Loca, where the mayor is called Mr. Mean, but the gags about her are meaner. The Hillary character jumps on a subway to Shea Stadium, “where I can watch my favorite team, the New York Yankees!” When an annoyed straphanger educates her that the Yankees play in Yankee Stadium, the Hillary character trills, “We live in Chappaqua now, you know. That’s Indian for ‘The Land of Separate Bedrooms.’ ” Necks swivel in unison toward Table 28. She’s laughing! Then she’s hit with the lyrics “If she could handle Monica, would Rudy cause her pain?” Heads whirl toward Table 28. “How does she look?” “Wan.” In a skit where the Hillary character is jailed by the Mayor Giuliani character, she finds herself sharing a cell with Sean “Puffy” Combs and his girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez. Bill Clinton shows up with “soft bail money,” but instead of springing his wife, he feels Jennifer’s pain and strolls off arm in arm with the half-naked songstress.

Before Round Three begins, one of the mayor’s men approaches Hillary’s press secretary, Wolfson, and asks to take the First Lady backstage. “Why should she go backstage?” snarls the handler, a stain of fear spreading across his formal shirt.

“Tra-dish-shun!” sings the mayor’s man.

Backstage, Hillary again approaches the unsuspecting mayor from behind and delicately lays a hand on his shoulder. He turns around. She faces him down with flattery. “Well, I hear you’re the real star.”

Her charm offensive seems to rattle him. When Rudy’s smile is forced, the lips turn down, and his deathly white face resembles that of the Phantom of the Opera. Regaining his edge after she leaves, he gets off a few sarcastic remarks to reporters: “I’m very, very encouraged at the fact we’re drawing lots of out-of-towners to this performance of mine.”

Of mine.

But it is Hillary’s star power that radiates to every corner of the ballroom. New York bigwigs, such as financial-media impresario Michael Bloomberg, attorney and labor mediator Theodore Kheel, and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, crane to see her. An informal receiving line forms three-deep around her table. Powerful men who might be expected to support the mayor but who cannot get a phone call returned from him are drawn to meet Hillary. One is Harold Levy, the interim New York City schools chancellor, who is about to be slapped down by the mayor for daring to work out incentives with the teachers’ union to avert a crisis in the city’s summer-school program; his crime, failing to recognize the real schools chancellor—Rudolph Giuliani. Another enemy the mayor can’t afford, Michael Long, chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State, waits his turn. The tall, hefty man with a kindly Saint Bernard face holds a minimum of 350,000 votes in his pocket, but Giuliani won’t talk to him. They sat down nearly a year before, and Long told the mayor his party was open to considering an endorsement. By summer, when Long hadn’t heard back, he joined with New York governor George Pataki, who at the time was said to be unofficially promoting the candidacy of Rick Lazio, a young and likable Long Island congressman. “I told the mayor, ‘Don’t take it personal,’ ” Long recalls. “ ‘Competition is good.’ The mayor said, ‘Does that mean you won’t talk to me?’ I said, ‘No, not at all.’ He then said, ‘O.K., the ball is in my court, I’ll get back to you.’ ” Long is still waiting for the phone call. “He didn’t ask for our nomination. He didn’t ask for the Republican Party nomination. The man has still not announced.… Frankly, I don’t think he really wants to be senator.”

Now a big blonde at the next table, pinned in her seat by the throng around Hillary, appeals to garrulous ex-mayor Ed Koch to introduce her to Hillary. This is not just any big blonde, this is Zenia Mucha, officially a senior policy adviser to Governor Pataki; to any-one who knows, this is the mild governor’s enforcer and political scorekeeper. Since the intra-family rivalry between her Republican boss and the Republican mayor approaches that between Tony Soprano and his uncle Junior, one might expect this to be merely a courtesy call. But like everyone else, Zenia cannot wait to meet the famous Democrat. Koch introduces her to Hillary as “one strong woman to another.”

Hillary does her fly-open eyes in recognition of an important personage. She asks that her greetings be conveyed to the First Lady of New York, Libby Pataki, “especially because she is so gracious.” Zenia melts. “This woman looked classy. The show is particularly tough on her. And she’s handling herself very well.”

How can a mere mayor compete?

As the supporting cast for his skit Rudy wanted the actors from The Sopranos, since he loves impersonating the Mafia, but they begged off with a scheduling conflict. As a result, the man who has lately been telling the public he is too busy with his “day job” to waste his time campaigning against some lady from Arkansas, in fact, has been sneaking out of City Hall early every day for a week to rehearse his acting and dancing with the cast of the Broadway musical Saturday Night Fever. All suited up in a white satin tux and black shirt, the usually dour former prosecutor is itching to gyrate Travolta-style and show everyone what a fun guy he really is.

Offstage voices set the theme of his show: What’s wrong with Rudy? What’s wrong with Rudy?

Anticipatory laughter ripples through the audience.

Lights up. Giuliani is stretched out on his analyst’s couch and talking about his issues. “My main problem is the anger,” he says. “I get so angry.”

Therapist: Anything in particular?

Rudy: Yes, the goddamn press!

Jumpy, the mayor asks if the place is wired. “I’m not paranoid,” he protests to his therapist. “I just don’t trust people.”

The schlumpy therapist character is played by Elliot Cuker, a former chauffeur who boasts of being “probably the mayor’s closest friend.” A failed actor who is now a classic-car dealer, Cuker somehow worked his way through the mayor’s famously tough shell and, in the guise of his acting coach, claims to have helped Giuliani discover the inner Rudy. “I really love him [Cuker],” the mayor told The New York Times two years ago. “I used to think about acting that it was making something up, as opposed to trying to find out how you honestly and legitimately react to something.”

Cuker has told the cast that this is his last show (term-limited along with the mayor), and he is going to make it spectacular. “So Elliot writes a show with himself as the star,” complained someone familiar with the production, casting himself as Rudy’s therapist—the only person in the world he can trust. Some advisers shuddered as Elliot easily talked the mayor into parodying himself as a mean, angry, paranoid man with dangerous multiple personalities. “Bizarre, but we couldn’t stop it.”

Under Cuker’s direction, the mayor’s reaction to his anger problem is to “act out” as one menacing character after another. In an expensively produced film, Giuliani is seen as an Elvis on a Harley. He’s gunning it through Central Park, leading a pack of cops dressed as Hell’s Angels, when he’s cut off by a rival gang. His cycle stalls. He jumps off, twirling a chain. He challenges the leader of the rival gang, who turns out to be Howard Safir, his police commissioner. No irony there. Everyone knows Rudy has already kneecapped Safir.

The Cuker therapist character leaps out of the bushes and talks Rudy down: “Cool it, Rudy, cool it.” He asks where the rage is coming from. Rudy says he thinks it’s coming from some primitive part of himself.

“You mean, like Jekyll and Hyde?”

This show is getting uncomfortably real. That very day I had interviewed Giuliani’s first police commissioner, Bill Bratton, who told me the mayor could be very charming, very warm, very gracious. “But there is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of side to him.”

The next role in which Cuker casts the mayor is as a beast. Hairy, with fang underbite, he blunders Kong-like into the posh restaurant Le Cirque. Snorting and drooling, he paws the food off plates of celebrities like Henry Kissinger. Even an offering of foie gras fails to subdue the savage Rudy, and when a waiter warns diners that it’s a New York City violation to serve animals, the mayor picks up a chair and is about to dispatch the waiter when—to the rescue—it’s Elliot again! “Take it easy, Rudy,” and away he leads the beast. The tag line to each of these scenes is: What’s wrong with that guy?

By now, some of the people who tried to persuade the mayor to tone down the show are writhing in embarrassment at the flat-footed Freudianism. “What does this say?” groaned one of the writhers. “He’s out of control. The only person who can subdue him is Elliot.”

In the climactic Saturday Night Fever sequence Giuliani is learning how to dance. His coach executes frontal hip thrusts. When Rudy still doesn’t get it, the dancer says, “Think presidential.” The audience groans. Another person associated with the show said, “It’s agonizing. It’s degrading to the mayor. I gotta leave.”

Through it all Hillary never flinches. She smiles her opaque Cleopatra smile and chuckles as consistently as if she were programmed with a laugh track.

She is showing herself to this crowd of jovial jackals to be one classy lady. The photo the next morning in The New York Times, of her beaming and beautiful as she shakes her opponent’s hand, is worth a million words. A City Hall adviser had to admit it.

“She was royalty. And she showed up the king.”

It is a Senate race unlike any in history—a grand opera, both comic and tragic, with subplots, scheming secondary characters, and what lead players! It all started when the First Lady—the first to have faced down a federal grand jury and survived a presidential impeachment—sat down with Harold Ickes on February 12, 1999, only moments after her husband was acquitted by the U.S. Senate of charges of lying under oath and obstructing justice. She began then laying out a strategy to run for United States senator herself. Such guts! Such gall! Such sweet revenge! It would be “a race for redemption,” in the words of her adviser Ickes. “For her to run and win a very, very prestigious seat would permit her supporters to say there was a lot more here than anybody thought: ‘You guys were wrong!’ ”

The media assumed that her opponent would be the larger-than-life mayor who had transformed a war zone into “the capital of the world.” But Giuliani hadn’t declared himself a candidate. Being a loner and congenitally impatient, he is proud of a leadership style whereby he simply picks up the phone and says, “Do it!” That is understood to mean my way or no way. Why, then, would he have the slightest interest in being one of a hundred in an institution that moves with the alacrity of New York rush-hour traffic?

“There’s no question in my mind that he’d rather be executive—the prosecutor, the mayor, the C.E.O.,” observed Joseph Bruno, the Republican State Senate majority leader. “Giuliani would really like to be governor, but the job’s taken.”

‘The whole thing started out as a joke,” acknowledges Zenia Mucha. Once the popular Harlem congressman Charles Rangel proudly announced on TV in February 1999 that the New York Democratic Party had “pulled together an offer that the First Lady can’t refuse,” the joke turned into a dare for Giuliani. According to Mucha, “It was not ‘Are you interested in running for the United States Senate?’ but more ‘Do you think you can beat her?’ ”

It is not in Giuliani’s nature to duck a fight. Besides, says a City Hall insider, “he’s a performer, like every politician. And this is the biggest show of the year—bigger than the presidency.”

“He has never been a party man,” says a current state Republican official. “If the opposing candidate were anyone else but Hillary, he’d have an enormously hard time getting elected, because he’s not courting rank-and-file Republicans. He’s counting on the hatred for Hillary to carry him.”

A former member of the Giuliani administration says, “With Rudy, it’s all about him, not about politics.” Mike Long echoes the sentiment: “Is it that Rudy Giuliani is for Rudy Giuliani and nobody else?”

People make the same observation about Hillary. “This is all about her, not about New York,” complained liberal San Francisco Chronicle columnist Phil Matier. When the dean of New York City television journalists, Gabe Pressman, finally got his interview with Mrs. Clinton, she sounded much like a woman working out a life change.

Pressman: You explained why you want to be a senator, but a key question is why from New York?

Mrs. Clinton: And, you know, it’s a wonderful, fair question.… I’ve always wanted to live in New York. Who doesn’t want to live in New York?

One seasoned New York observer wisecracked, “So, is a Senate seat from New York like a Fresh Air Fund vacation for disadvantaged Washington wives?”

Even a New York Times reporter admitted in private, “You get drawn into her psychological makeup.… I feel like I am trying to feel what she is going through. It’s like my parents. It draws you in a strange way. I want her to work it out.” But what does that have to do with electing a senator?

From the moment these two stepped into the ring, the games began. Both were demonized at dinner tables, straw votes were taken, husbands and wives bickered, friends hung up on one another, and the professional political class felt its blood run hot again. Much of the voting public saw them both as gargoyles. By January, Giuliani’s unfavorables were at 28 percent, Hillary’s at 43 percent. They polarized by race, gender, ethnicity—you name it. That same month, fully 51 percent of registered voters in a Marist poll said they’d like to see someone else run.

This political contest is not one where either candidate has to worry about name recognition or voter base or selling people on anything. It is all about hate. The hatred for Hillary is so deep, and the antipathy toward Rudy mounting so fast, it creates a massive polarization that is dividing up a state which now feels more like warring cities during the time of the doges in medieval Italy.

Nor is this merely a statewide race, it is a national contest. By bombarding Republican mailboxes across the country with anti-Hillary pitches, painting her as “a champion of every left-wing cause you can imagine,” the Giuliani campaign is set to smash the record for contributions to a Senate candidate. It nearly met its goal of $20 million in March, seven months before the election. Seventy-five percent of total contributions poured in as a result of direct-mail solicitations in every state in the Union, and not all for the love of Rudy. Hillary’s candidacy is an outlet for those whose hatred of the Clintons defines their politics.

“There is a real dilemma that New York is facing—hatred for Hillary, Rudy’s personality, and the prospect of leaving the city to Mark Green [the city’s public advocate, an ambitious liberal Democrat who would become mayor to fill out the last year of Giuliani’s term],” says Zenia Mucha, who generally speaks for the governor. “It is a soap opera in and of itself.”

Sniping is natural in the early stages of any political contest as a means to probe an opponent’s weaknesses. But almost from the minute the First Lady expressed interest in a Senate seat from his state, Giuliani tried his best to keep her out of his city.

In April 1999, Mrs. Clinton was to serve as “principal for a day” in a Queens school. Giuliani, who was given the same role in a Brooklyn school, challenged Rudy Crew, then his schools chancellor. “He said her visit was just politics and not motivated by concern for children,” Dr. Crew recalled. Mrs. Clinton did attend, and when a picture of Dr. Crew with her appeared in The New York Times, it became a constant source of irritation between the two men. The next fall, Mrs. Clinton was again asked to appear in New York, this time to highlight the need for state and federal dollars to help repair the city’s deteriorating schools after the mayor had all but gutted the original capital plan. Dr. Crew got word that the mayor didn’t want him to appear with the First Lady and that he was angry. The chancellor was supposed to figure out a way to cancel the event. He called the mayor’s deputy, Tony Coles, and said, “That will never happen. You don’t tell the First Lady of your nation that she can’t come to your school and do this when you’ve gone to Washington and asked for her help.”

Crew believes this was the crowning insult, greater even than their dispute over school vouchers, which caused the mayor to oust him several months later. “When you say no, you have violated the terms and conditions of the relationship with Rudy. He never forgets that you said no. Friendship with Rudy is conditional upon your ability to subjugate your ideas, your feelings and beliefs.… He didn’t want my relationship with Hillary to be put into operation as they run against each other.”

Then, in June 1999, after hearing that Talk magazine wanted to throw a party to launch its first issue, with Hillary on the cover, Giuliani banned the whole bunch from his Brooklyn Navy Yard. This March, upon learning that gas prices had topped two dollars at the pumps near Chappaqua, Hillary’s new Westchester neighborhood, he rushed up to her backyard to do a photo op. Later, lunching at a diner in nearby Mount Kisco, the mayor gathered around him a circle of Westchester Republican officials and recounted blow by blow his Inner Circle performance. He replayed the scene where, in drag, he took the part of a ditsy woman who couldn’t decide on a hat.

“Joan Rivers as the salesgirl turns to me and says, ‘Make up your mind, bitch, who do you think you are—Hillary Clinton?!’ ”

All the mayor’s men laughed hard.

A friend of Hillary’s had warned her back in the fall of ‘99, “You know, Giuliani is such a rhinoceros, he’s going to be taking a bite out of you every day.” Gameface firmly in place, Hillary revealed her fight strategy: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last seven years, it’s how to hold my tongue.”

Rudy had blasted her in a fund-raising letter, accusing her of “hostility toward America’s religious traditions,” based on her careful defense of the right of the Brooklyn Museum of Art to hang its “Sensation” show, featuring a dung-encrusted painting of the Madonna. She may have a checkered past, but one thing she has always been is a stalwart do-good Methodist. When the mayor’s attack was read to her, Hillary started her day quaking with rage. But later, speaking to reporters, the rhetoric was disciplined, unemotional: “As a person of faith, I am appalled that he would make false statements about me and my respect for religion in order to raise money for his campaign.”

Next, the First Lady had the audacity to say she wanted to march in his St. Patrick’s Day Parade—with his cops and his firemen and his emerald societies.

The mayor danced ahead of all the other dignitaries, darting from side to side up Fifth Avenue, grabbing for hands, flashing his jack-o’-lantern grin through a snowstorm, and dissing Hillary. Asked where she was by a TV reporter, he shrugged. “I dunno. She got lost along the way.” Seeking out another camera, he said, “I think New Yorkers will elect a real New Yorker. She ought to go back to Arkansas.”

Hillary’s young supporters ran alongside the barricades trying to stir up cheers but were drowned out by the shouts of “Hillary, go home!” Cops all along the way, when asked, “Has Hillary passed by yet?,” answered, “Hillary who?”

When a couple looking like the Honeymooners was asked if they were from New York, the wife, Erin McGurgan, said, “Up the Hudson River a bit, Saugerties.”

What do you think about Rudy Giuliani?

“What?” her husband, Ralph, butted in. “He’s our man. What do you mean? Are you crazy? What are you, Hillary people? get outta here!!!”

Erin was asked what she thought about Hillary. “I used to like her a lot more,” she said tentatively.

“But I am working on her hard!” shouted her husband.

Hillary marched dutifully through the sleet, surrounded by children, like a schoolmarm. She was booed. Not even the popular Ed Koch could shield her. Undaunted, she smiled bravely and never flinched—another rite of passage.

The most glaring difference between these two combatants has nothing to do with politics. Rudy is a New Yorker inside and out. Hillary could live here for 20 years and she will never be a New Yorker. Then why is Giuliani so easily threatened by her?

Here he is, the giant-killer who took a debauched New York City, known for nearly a century as “ungovernable,” and scared it into civility. A Central Park that a visitor can cross without being approached to buy drugs and where emptying one’s bladder behind a tree might produce a “quality-of-life summons.” A city where suburban commuters approve that the unsightly homeless have been moved off the streets, threatened with jail if they don’t agree to go to shelters. A city that used to be a welfare magnet for over a million poor souls, whose rolls have been cut in half. A sparkling Times Square, where tourists take baby strollers, and where the mayor conducted a New Year’s Eve millennial celebration for two million people who danced in the streets without a single serious incident.

Giuliani is a restless lion of a man who leaps at problems unsolvable by others. According to Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari, “It is the challenge to bring about change that nobody else has been able to do. It’s about producing the next big miracle.” Only Giuliani’s hero, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, stamped as strong an imprint on the city’s seething surface. But now, in Hillary Clinton, he has a powerful force, a celebrity with worldwide wattage, casting a shadow on his sphere of influence.

And even his Republican cronies see her as a serious threat. Molinari has said of Hillary since day one, “She is a formidable candidate. It will be a very tough race. Never before in the history of this country have we seen one quite like this one.” Former senator Al D’Amato claims to harbor no animosity toward Hillary, just total disdain. But he has to admit, “She is very, very smart, and calculated.” Congressman Charles Rangel says of Giuliani, “He is a street fighter, and I think he’s insecure, and she is intimidating. H.R.C. is intimidating.”

The lowest blow was inadvertently struck by one of Giuliani’s new best friends, Senator John McCain. Speaking to students at Columbia University in April, McCain predicted that if Hillary won “she would be a star of the quality that has not been seen since Bobby Kennedy was elected senator from the state of New York [in 1964].” The remark also underscored an irony that goes unmentioned when Giuliani attacks Hillary as a carpetbagger. Of the two candidates, the one who worked for the election of Kennedy—the last Democratic carpetbagger to run for a New York Senate seat—was the then Democrat Giuliani.

She didn’t always look formidable. A yearlong tease featured a seven-month bogus “listening tour,” which generally excluded the public, plus world-class missteps that insulted Jews (when she was silent for 12 hours after Suha Arafat’s charge that Israeli forces used poison gas on Palestinian women and children), Puerto Ricans (challenging the president’s offer of clemency to F.A.L.N. radicals), and mortgage holders (accepting a favorable home-loan arrangement from a campaign crony). By January 2000, a Marist poll had Hillary trailing nine points behind Rudy. Among male voters in a Quinnipiac College poll, one-quarter found nothing to like about her. But the real wake-up call was her 50-point downswing over the year among upstate women voters (Hillary dropped from a 28-point lead to a 22-point deficit in this Marist poll).

An almost incoherent rage was frequently expressed by progressive Democratic white women who should have been her core supporters. “She’s defended that lying lowlife all these years. I’m ashamed to be part of the same gender,” said a liberal Democratic publisher. “I never lived my life through a man,” fumed a doctor who pulled herself up from a barefoot rural southern background to an M.D. and Manolo Blahniks. “I’m sick of Bill Clinton. She’s cut from the same cloth,” said another. The envy factor looms large. To women who have fought hard to move up in their careers, the spectacle of Hillary announcing her very first political candidacy practically from the balcony of the East Wing was just too Evita. She’s starting at the top. Why? Because she’s married to the top guy.

Suburban moms were also turning off. Today they are mostly professional women who have temporarily suspended their careers to spend time with their children. They, too, have been to Wellesley and Yale, and it is hard to dazzle them. They compare themselves with Hillary and wonder, Why not me? Hillary has not been a corporate executive responsible for the bottom line, or a distinguished jurist; she hasn’t tried a big, complex class-action suit. So how is it she made partner at the Rose Law Firm in three years?

At a February breakfast of older New York professional women who were supporting Bill Bradley, the founder of the N.C.B.W. (National Coalition of 100 Black Women, Inc.), Jewell Jackson McCabe, let the cork out of the bottle:

“New York stands as tall as any other state in terms of women who are courageous and capable and well educated. When you look at Constance Baker Motley, who argued 10 Supreme Court cases, and Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Nita Lowey—we’ve got qualified women. Why go outside the state?”

A spontaneous, even thunderous burst of applause greeted her remarks.

When January came and went and Hillary’s poll numbers continued to tank, she finally acquiesced to a formal announcement event, on February 6. Her media advisers wanted to make a short film to “reintroduce” her, but they didn’t know how. This complex, contradictory, Tammy Wynette feminist still had not clearly defined herself. And none of her operatives dared do it for her. The risky task fell to her old pal Hollywood producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. She and her producer husband, Harry, had argued against Hillary’s running, as had most of her friends and advisers—except Bill Clinton. As always, it was Hillary’s choice.

The problem was her biography. “It’s a minefield,” groaned an adviser. And in this election year, with an ebullient economy, the overriding issue is a candidate’s life story. Could they cherry-pick Hillary’s bittersweet biography?

“If she’s going to go big picture, she’ll lose,” said one of the savviest political consultants in New York, George Arzt, former press secretary for Koch. “She has to go out in the streets—people want to be touched and touch the candidate and feel she’s real. She’s acting like the queen.”

The late New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who was a stiff Wasp on the campaign trail, needed his genial attorney general, Louis Lefkowitz, to take him around the city’s fervently ethnic neighborhoods and warn him not to drink “milchik” with his “flayshig” (milk with his hot dogs). Hillary needed Nita Lowey to take her into the crowds to show she’s a haimisheh gal—warm and approachable. But Hillary had jumped the line ahead of Lowey, who has toiled for 12 years as a popular congresswoman from Westchester, and wherever this smart, safely attractive grandmother appeared, New Yorkers would swarm around her, to express regrets that her own Senate candidacy had been usurped. As one female Republican executive said, “Nita Lowey earned the right to run for that office. I have been in corporate situations where the favorite daughter comes in from outside and leaps over everybody else. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

For reporters scavenging up and down icy slopes in search of the media entrance for Hillary’s announcement at the Westchester college suny Purchase, it was like trying to get into suny Attica. The Clinton campaign was still operating with a White House mentality. After the Secret Service inspected tape recorders as if they were nuclear detonators, journalists were dispatched to the opposite side of the campus to pick up a piece of yellow paper with Hillary’s name on it.

The promise of the day was that, at last, the Real Hillary would stand up and speak with her own voice. Instead, what we got was another makeover.

The gymnasium was packed with supporters, invited elected officials, bigfoot journalists, and Lucianne Goldberg, self-proclaimed architect of Monicagate. Banners, buttons, posters, everything in sight, “reintroduced” her as hillary!—shorn of the stigma of Clinton. The video, for which she paid a quarter of a million dollars, featured what looked like a single mom who worked tirelessly for children’s rights and told us she also makes “a mean tossed salad and a great omelette.” Unsuccessfully coaxed in the past to reveal some, any, vulnerability in order to soften her image, Hillary had told the former Clinton strategist Dick Morris, “I can’t think of any.” In the film, though, her friends told us that she couldn’t sing. The most Hillary-esque touch was the plaintive opening ditty, rendered in the voice of a small child: “No one can stop me from being me.”

The marching orders of the day were given by Hillary. She ascended like a queen, flanked by the two New York senators and followed by an inconspicuous president. It must have been the first time that a president of the United States shared the stage with another politician who never bothered to introduce him, even acknowledge him, except to refer twice to “Bill,” as in the Showboat lyric “Just my Bill.” Clinton sat, grinning and looking as if he wished he had someone to talk to. “It was felt that if he said anything, he’d upstage her,” explained one of Hillary’s operatives. Chelsea sat onstage next to her grandmother, who stared off into space.

“You know,” Hillary said, “the first time I spoke to a group this large was at my college commencement in 1969. I’m a little older now [laughter] … a little blonder [laughter] … a lot humbler. I’ve gone to work, I’ve raised a child, and I’ve spent 30 years trying to better the lives of children and families. But I often return to one thing I said way back then—that politics is the art of making possible what appears to be impossible.”

In the many times I have seen Hillary speak, she never fails to dazzle audiences by speaking in paragraphs, without notes. That day, she was fully scripted. It was a sober policy speech, delivered with scarcely a smile or an attempt at emotional connection with the residents of her adopted state, except when she acknowledged in a bad imitation of a Brooklyn cabbie that the campaign would be a fight: “But, hey, this is Noo Yawk!”

She reminded the audience “that families are the bedrock of our society.” When it came time to take pictures, however, Hillary was being photographed only solo or with the senators. Nita Lowey had to go over and remind the candidate to stand together as a family with Bill and Chelsea.

The Speaker of the State Assembly was pleased. Sheldon Silver, one of the three most powerful men in New York State government and a chief adviser of Hillary’s, saw her video as very positive. “This is who Hillary is: she is daughter, she is mother, she is a worker, she gets where she wants to go with hard work. That was the message she wanted to create.”

I pointed out that she had minimized a good deal of who she is—she wasn’t prominently shown in her role as First Lady, she wasn’t a wife, she wasn’t the Rose Law Firm lawyer. She wasn’t filmed as a family with her husband. It almost looked like outtakes from the syrupy Clinton promo film The Man from Hope, shown at the ‘92 Democratic convention, which depicted her as the political wife.

The slow-speaking assembly boss restated the campaign mantra: “The idea was to show that she was a daughter and a mother—someone who is compassionate and caring. Not political and calculating.” He said it was meant to dispel the impression people had taken from reading about Hillary and looking at her always as the lawyer and the president’s wife. When people meet her, he said, “the impression is this is not some unusual person—this is the neighbor next door.”

Hillary didn’t immediately come down from her pedestal, but after being attacked by her own Westchester district congresswoman, Republican Sue Kelly, for being “a carpetbagger who does not know New York,” Hillary forced herself to play the new role. While the media were enthralled with McCain mania, Hillary launched a weeklong Chappaqua charm offensive. Concentrating on women and children, Hillary hopscotched from house party to supermarket, to temple, to school, to the local library, where she read to toddlers—adopting the role of the community’s Mother Goose.

The day after a Michigan school shooting took the life of a six-year-old girl, Hillary appealed to 150 fourth- and fifth-graders at Valley Cottage Elementary School in Rockland County as if they were her own. “And I want you to promise me … you will never ever pick up a gun with any idea of using it against any person,” she said. “Will you promise me that?” In unison, students hummed “Yes,” or “I promise.” The few adult onlookers were impressed with her sincerity and warmth. “I saw her more as a mother, and I never looked at it that way before,” said Dr. Mary Anne Evangelist, assistant superintendent of the Nyack school district. “Maybe in this kind of an environment she has less of a reason to be in a role, because the majority of the audience is children. The way she treats her daughter is probably the person she really is.”

Indeed, the one role in which Hillary seems utterly genuine is as a mother. Chelsea never fails to impress people with her beautiful manners, her joie de vivre, and her seriousness as a Stanford pre-med student. To Chelsea her mother is the most important person in the world, and Hillary continues to be vigilant about protecting her. Even when pressed by an adviser to trumpet her maternal love for the benefit of soccer moms, by campaigning with Chelsea in a mall, Hillary firmly refused. The adviser said, “She will never exploit Chelsea.”

At a women’s panel at a Reform synagogue in Chappaqua, Hillary’s charm offensive went into overdrive. She came early rather than late and took a backseat to other female panelists. When it was her turn to share, she spoke of closet space in the White House, scrambled eggs and applesauce (her homemade specialties), and the importance of having the blessings of those around us.

In the past, Hillary would speak at an event and exit almost immediately. But this night she stayed to join in a Q&A and then to shake hands. No imperious press flack pushed people back. Hillary let ordinary people break the rope line and engage in lengthy conversations with her, not as the queen or the star but, according to one woman in the audience, “as someone not that much different from myself.” Hillary has been pleasantly surprised by this new approach: “When I say, ‘Gosh, what is the best moisturizer you use?,’ people say, ‘Gosh, she cares about the same things I do.’ ”

While Giuliani brushed off pleas to campaign outside the city, Hillary beavered away upstate. In a half-dozen visits to the Buffalo area, she worked diners and senior centers all over the county, which has the largest enclave of Democratic voters in the state outside New York City. “Her one-on-ones give great word of mouth,” says Steve Pigeon, the Erie County Democratic Committee chairman. “We consistently hear, ‘She’s not at all what we expected.’ It’s not the tough image. They find her warm and friendly.”

The contrast in their styles couldn’t be more dramatic. If Hillary is now working at being the good Mother Goose, Rudolph Giuliani is sticking with the only role he knows: the old-fashioned Italian father, the authoritarian padrone who says, “My way or no way,” and whose unruly children fear and respect him for it. Rudy’s favorite movie is The Godfather. He is steeped in Mafia lore.

When Giuliani was the number-three man in the Reagan Justice Department, he spent thousands of hours listening to tapes of mafiosi and interviewing the retired mobster Joe Bonanno. As a proud Italian-American, Giuliani took it as his crusade to expose the Mafia as a bunch of pathetic punk gangsters. When he accepted the job of U.S. attorney for Manhattan and the Southern District in 1983, he came to town ready to blindside the Mob with his brains, a conspiracy statute called rico, and the 200 F.B.I. agents he brought with him. He boasted in 1985 that the government could crush the Mafia “in four or five years.” He accomplished it in another year and a half. In late 1986 the bosses from four of New York’s five Mafia families did a pirouette in court and went off to prison. Only one, John Gotti, got away.

That made for one of the more memorable moments in my journalistic career. Gotti, as the reputed head of the Gambino crime family, was the biggest name in the New York Mob. Giuliani was apoplectic when the gangster fought off murder and racketeering charges and sauntered out of court in March 1987 after a sensational acquittal to bask in the TV lights. By letting it be known that he would make a play to become overboss of all the New York families, he started a classic gangland war—not as bad as when Michael Corleone had to go to Sicily, but bad.

One afternoon in the spring of 1987, Giuliani took me along while he tooled around Manhattan’s Lower East Side in his shark-gray sedan, without bodyguards. The idea was to show me how he had cleaned up the drug traffic. But he couldn’t resist a detour through Little Italy. “We’re right near the Ravenite Social Club now,” said Giuliani, “which is Gotti’s club.”

As we cruised past we saw, sunning themselves at a sidewalk café, as brazen as pigeons in the park, a collection of the Boys. They did a double take.

“Oh, these guys know me,” Giuliani said with a smirk. “Believe me, when they see this car, they’re going to go crazy.” I looked out the window and suddenly gasped.

“There’s Gotti!”

“Where?”

“Right there.” I pointed to the stocky man sunning himself in a lawn chair on the sidewalk. “Isn’t that John Gotti?”

The don grinned hard at Giuliani and tipped back in his chair, filling out his Palm Beach suit and displaying his post-trial suntan. Giuliani’s face took on the terrible whiteness of the inquisitor Torquemada, and he glared back.

Gotti then brushed one index finger against the other in a stage gesture that said, “Tsk, tsk, naughty, naughty!”

It was a priceless moment—the city’s top mafioso scolding the city’s top federal law-enforcement official like a bad boy for trespassing on his turf. Giuliani reveled in the stare-down. No sooner had we pulled around the corner than he giggled nervously. “Didn’t he look terrific?” He described the don’s conduct with undisguised admiration. “What Gotti is doing there is very subtle—a form of charisma and leadership. Like General MacArthur—‘The bullets don’t hit me.’ ”

One of Giuliani’s former top law-enforcement officials shared an insight about the mayor’s brand of toughness: “Our big joke about Rudy was he never made it to school with his lunch money. I find an awful lot of lawyers would not be macho manly types. They hide behind the law and it gives them the nerve they wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Elliot Cuker put another spin on the Gotti moment. He says Rudy never made harsh judgments on the wrongdoers he chased. “He saw them as human beings first, criminals second … almost like a Christ attitude of looking at sinners. These people picked that up and so they didn’t feel humiliated by him, and therefore a lot of people helped him out” (i.e., were turned as witnesses).

Giuliani himself, explaining why he thinks The Sopranos is so authentic, described Tony’s tribe as “a group of people that aren’t very different than everybody else but for the pathological way in which they conduct their business … enormously complex people who love their children, love their friends, but then every once in a while go out and kill one of them.”

One might find a resonance in the way Rudy Giuliani and his City Hall entourage conduct their business, using the power of the law and the police, patronage and dismissal, to deal with their enemies. Rudy and his wife, Donna Hanover, who insiders say commutes between a separate apartment and Gracie Mansion, where she puts her children to bed, appear to be about as close as Tony Soprano and his embittered wife, Carmela. Tony sees a psychiatrist because, for all his power, he complains, “Where’s my happiness?” Rudy talks like an angry man who could be seeing a psychiatrist. And, like Tony, he loves his children, loves his friends, but then every once in a while he goes out and vilifies one of them.

Giuliani is always at war with somebody. He is a political pyromaniac setting fire to all those who would challenge his own reality as Supreme Ruler of all New York. When he fires his commissioners, it isn’t enough to run them out of town. He has to insult them, humiliate them, call them names, try to cut their benefits.

But like a good don, the mayor does reward those who respect him and kiss his ring. Guy Molinari says, “I wouldn’t go to him and ask for something that was outlandish. He has almost never turned me down.” Ray Harding, who heads the patronage machine known as the Liberal Party, helped push Rudy to victory in 1993. Coincidentally, both of Harding’s sons were later tapped for important political appointments. Russell Harding, a college dropout, was hired to run the city’s Housing Development Corporation (which offers several hundred million in loans) at a salary of $111,000. “Tammany had higher standards than this,” carped Richard C. Wade, an urban historian, in a New York Times interview. In March, just as a revolt was building within the Liberal Party among those who want to endorse Hillary, the other Harding son, Robert, was promoted from budget director to deputy mayor.

A sober commentary on Giuliani is offered by a man whose support the mayor badly needs, Republican congressman Peter King. A sharp, straightforward, working-class lawyer who is the voice of Irish-Catholic conservatives on Long Island’s South Shore, King has known Giuliani since the two interned together in 1967 at Richard Nixon’s old law firm, Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Mitchell. “From what I know of Rudy, and from what I have heard of Hillary, there are a lot of similarities,” King remarks. “But I have not seen the dark side of Hillary. I have seen the dark side of Rudy.”

Cracking under the pressure of facing a rival with a star quality that outshines even his own, Rudy revealed his dark side to everyone in March. Perhaps the bubble of euphoria by which New York was portrayed as the safe and civilized Millennial City was just waiting to burst anyway. How many times can police shoot unarmed men of color before a crisis boils over?

When the news reported on March 17 the third killing of a defenseless black man in 13 months, a collective shudder went through the city. Media reports were scanty the first morning after. Patrick Dorismond, a 26-year-old security officer of Haitian origin, was off-duty and hailing a cab near Madison Square Garden when approached at random by a plainclothes officer asking to buy drugs. Police could not confirm a witness’s report that a backup plainclothes cop had hit the victim with his service revolver. The gun went off and killed Dorismond.

Within hours of the shooting, Giuliani authorized opening sealed police records on the dead man, both juvenile and adult records, and began pumping out an incriminating picture of the victim. Rather than expressing sympathy to the family and two children of the slain man, the mayor said the dead man had a “propensity to violence.” Only two and a half days after the shooting, the mayor put on his prosecutor face for a TV interview on “Fox News Sunday” and all but “convicted” Patrick Dorismond of “robbery, attempted robbery, possession of a gun … convictions and arrests, both.”

In fact, the man had only two convictions, both for disorderly conduct, and had paid small fines. A former high official in the Giuliani Police Department almost choked on his coffee when he saw the mayor on TV that Sunday. “I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Why would he intentionally escalate it? I think he’s losing it. Trust me, this is more than defending the police. I hear he’s looking for a reason to get out of the Senate race. He can’t stand the possibility of being beaten by a Clinton.”

As a broader picture emerged, it became clear that Giuliani had authorized a new anti-narcotics program, Operation Condor. The lure of overtime was drawing police into the street on their days off to hunt down low-level drug offenders, ostensibly to keep the mayor’s crime-fighting record intact. Despite the $24 million program, homicides were up this year by 11 percent—embarrassing for a candidate running on his record as a crime fighter. Condor cops are expected to produce collars. The three Hispanic officers who stalked Dorismond, with Condor cops in their backup team, were nearing the end of their shift and wanted to go for one more collar. “The first lesson they get as undercovers is: You’re not a cop, so you can’t react like a cop,” says a former top police official familiar with their training. “When the confrontation starts, you get your ass out of there. Walk away. Don’t engage. You’re not a cop.”

Tragically, the opposite happened when undercover detective Anderson Moran, scruffily dressed, asked Dorismond if he had any “krill” (street argot for crack cocaine). Dorismond reacted predictably: “Get outta my face.” Moran persisted in asking where he could score. Tempers flared. Moran summoned his “ghosts,” two plainclothes police. In less than 15 seconds many punches were thrown, somebody yelled “Gun!,” and, Detective Anthony Vasquez would later claim, his gun went off accidentally. Dorismond took a bullet to the chest, and before he could fall, dead, Moran delivered two more punches.

“Guns do not go off accidentally,” says the former high police official. “Somebody has to pull the trigger.… It’s an unintentional discharge, not accidental. Here’s the issue. Whether it’s subliminal or hidden in the deep recesses of our mind, we approach black men differently. To deny that is doing a disservice.” Giuliani’s first police commissioner, Bill Bratton, says, “One of my great frustrations with the mayor is that he did not recognize that he could have used the police success to bridge the racial divide in New York City.… Rudy was insensitive to the minority community.” Giuliani didn’t appreciate Bratton’s celebrity or his social-work approach and forced his resignation after just two years.

A current narcotics commander who has spent a long time in a minority community was among many police officials and cops who were upset by Giuliani’s handling of the Dorismond tragedy. “The mayor is off base completely,” he told me over his cell phone. “I’m going to a meeting in the madhouse [N.Y.P.D. headquarters] right now. They’ve lost their confidence. There is no leader there.” I asked the commander if Giuliani was now the police commissioner.

“Without question,” he said. “Without question.”

Hillary Clinton once told me, “I don’t do spontaneity.” Cautious and guarded, she is not quick to respond to the unexpected, and, at worst, as with Mrs. Arafat, she freezes. But the mayor’s demonization of a dead man and, by association, incrimination of a whole minority community inflamed her sense of injustice.

On the fifth night after the killing they were waiting for Hillary in Harlem. Eight hundred people sitting as still as gravestones in the Bethel A.M.E. Church, some cooling themselves with paper fans, they waited an hour for the First Lady to come and speak to their pain. As she walked down the aisle, a choir burst into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and Hillary Clinton was heralded with:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord …

In a trembly rasp, Congressman Charles Rangel said, “I feel in this church tonight the spirit of the 60s and the civil-rights movement.” He cloaked Hillary in the mantle of Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of the bus, he said, was an unexpected inspiration. “Nor did we in New York expect it would be Hillary Clinton who would come to our city to help us regain our dignity as a great metropolis.” As Hillary stepped forward, 800 people got to their feet and slapped their hands and everyone swayed. She did not let them down.

“New York has a real problem, and we all know it—all of us, it seems, except the mayor of this city.” Cheers of relief. She slammed Giuliani for rushing to judgment instead of waiting for the facts. “At just the moment when a real leader would have reached out to heal the wounds, he has chosen divisiveness.” But she was careful to withhold condemnation of the police.

In fact, that inspired evening wasn’t anything like the 60s. People were reflective, resolute, and empowered by what they heard. Most of them were already registered to vote, and they took home forms to register friends and family members. Ed Koch made a prediction to me: “Blacks and Hispanics are going to come out in this election like they’ve never come out before, because they hate Giuliani with a passion.”

By the beginning of April, Hillary had pulled ahead of Rudy in the polls for the first time in months—by up to 10 points. Rudy had lost among all his core groups: fellow Catholics, city residents, suburbanites, even among white men. His striking loss of support was summed up by analysts in one word: Dorismond. But to those who know him best, it may not have been the racial crisis that provoked Giuliani’s eccentric behavior but, rather, Giuliani’s eccentric behavior that provoked the crisis.

Curiously, Giuliani went straight for Hillary’s psyche in his counterattack: she was projecting. “There’s a process called projection in psychology,” the mayor explained at a City Hall news briefing. “It means accusing someone of what you’re doing. That is precisely what Mrs. Clinton is doing.” When he threw around other psychoanalytic terms such as “blocking” and “the unconscious,” his press secretary, Sunny Mindel, explained that the mayor reads a lot of Freud.

Both Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer and Congressman Rangel accused the mayor of being “in deep denial,” as his attempts to demonize the victim while lionizing the police became more frenzied by the day. The city comptroller, Democrat Alan Hevesi, excoriated the mayor for releasing the sealed records of Patrick Dorismond. “It was not only illegal, it was despicable, it was inhuman.”

“This isn’t the mayor’s strong suit—psychological stability,” I was told by Philadelphia police commissioner John Timoney, who lost his number-two job in the N.Y.P.D. when Giuliani forced out Bill Bratton. “When you marry yourself to the Police Department, as a politician, I guarantee you’re going to get burnt,” says Timoney. “Things go wrong all the time. The problem is, he has invested so much of his personality and persona in the Police Department that to save himself he has to come to their defense—even when they don’t want him to.”

The mayor lashed out at “demagogues”; he tried to wrap Al Sharpton, protégé of Jesse Jackson, around Hillary’s neck; and, finally, he blamed the press. I was at a City Hall press conference 12 days after the Dorismond shooting, when Giuliani was still obsessed with justifying his own conduct. The mayor was asked if he had created a “toxic atmosphere” in the city by releasing Dorismond’s sealed records and autopsy information. He sneered.

*Mayor: It’s amazing. It’s amazing how you all go one way. It’s amazing how you do not want the public to know the facts that might suggest that the officers might have acted properly.…

Q: How do you respond to those who say you are the lawless one, you are out of control? …

Mayor: Bogus. Let’s move on.

Q: Are you mentally ill?

Mayor: What was that? [Rudy looks down at the reporter, Rafael Martínez Alequín, one of his chief goads.]

Martínez Alequín: Are you mentally ill?

Mayor: [Sarcastically] Yes, I am.

Reporters: Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor …*

Finally, I got a chance to ask my question:

*One of your attributes as U.S. attorney was that you gave a man the benefit of the doubt. First he was a human being, second he was a criminal. Why, in the case of Patrick Dorismond, in the first 72 hours, even though he went to your high school under the guidance of the Christian Brothers, why would you first call him a criminal? Why did you rush to judgment?

Mayor: I didn’t. I laid out the facts that were being ignored by the press, which is what [they are] doing now, which is create a vacuum, and put the blame on the police officers. I haven’t reached a verdict, and I have no right to do so. Only a grand jury can do so. [He glares down at me with prosecutorial wrath.] You create a big lie, and ultimately a grand jury comes to the conclusion that the police officers acted correctly, but the public has been emotionally led that the police officers have done something wrong.*

His black eyes hooded by a bulging frontal lobe, one of the brightest of all mayors in the history of New York appeared bent on self-destruction.

What’s wrong with that guy? Congressman Peter King says his sister, who lives in Lower Manhattan, repeats every day: “Thank God for Rudy.”

“You mean Giuliani the psycho?” King once teased.

“You’re as crazy as he is,” King’s sister countered. “All you guys who came out of the 50s and that Catholic boys’ school mentality.”

King shot back, “Yeah, I can see some similarities, but I’m a nicer guy.”

Pete King began forming his view of Giuliani’s character back when the two were interning for $150 a week at Richard Nixon’s law firm. King’s first impression was that Giuliani was “shy and too nice a guy.” Within a week, though, Rudy’s anger and bullheadedness emerged memorably during an otherwise casual conversation.

The two were chatting on lunch break about different senators when another intern praised the New York Republican Kenneth Keating as one of the hardest-working men in the Senate. Out of nowhere, Rudy exploded. “You’re a fucking liar—he’s a drunk!” King remembers squirming as Rudy kept berating his peer: Who told him so? How did he have the nerve to make such a statement? He wouldn’t let up until the intern took back his words.

King was the conservative, Giuliani the knee-jerk liberal. They argued constantly. Rudy loved the Kennedys and was against the war. He hated prosecutors at the time; he thought they were lowlifes. Whatever position Rudy took, he had to win the argument, grind up his opponent, and then brag about it.

King once said that when he argued politics with Rudy, “it was as though I had attacked his religion.… There was no steady increase in the hostility. Suddenly, he’d be yelling and his eyes were popping out.” Josh Friedman, a Newsday reporter who covered Giuliani’s prosecution of a highly placed Democratic fixer in 1986, also noted that Rudy would get a “weird and crazy look in his eyes,” particularly when he was tired. “When he stays up all night, he starts giggling a lot.… I guess it would be called drunk on power.”

“He’s a troubled person, but he was the most effective prosecutor I’ve ever met,” says Irving Seidman, who faced U.S. Attorney Giuliani as the defense counsel for Geoffrey Lindenauer in the famous Donald Manes white-collar crime case that dominated the final years of the Koch administration.

Giuliani was first elected mayor by only 2 percent, defeating David Dinkins in 1993. His insecurities were soon apparent. He ordered the portraits of both immediate predecessors, Dinkins and Koch, moved out of the Blue Room, where press conferences are held at City Hall. By 1998, although his power had increased exponentially, Giuliani barricaded himself behind a deformity of concrete and steel grates, placing City Hall essentially off-limits to the public he serves. It took a federal judge to rule unconstitutional the mayor’s restrictions on rallies there.

Koch, who was originally a booster of the mayor’s, told me, “Giuliani cannot help himself. He’s like a scorpion. Why does a scorpion sting? It’s the nature of scorpions. Why does Giuliani do these bizarre things? Because it’s his nature.”

A former senior aide to Mayor Koch laments, “Giuliani could have been great, as Nixon could have been great, but their insecurities were too great. Giuliani is paranoid. Striking out at everybody, believing that people are trying to do him in or undermining him, is a sign of paranoia.”

One person who was close to the Giuliani administration over the years and who now works as a consultant describes the mayor as “a nightmare of a man. One day he could be as sweet and charming as you’d ever want. Then all of a sudden—it is bizarre, like watching a robin turn into a hawk. I’ve seen it happen too many times. That was why I got out of there. I had a constant fear of danger. Of danger.… People close to him say he is not well. Mentally.” How close? “As close as you can get.”

Rudy’s favorite opera is telling: Otello—the tragedy of a powerful governor known as “the Lion of Venice.” The Verdi opera is all about trust and betrayal and self-destruction. Things do not proceed well for the paranoid Otello. Tricked by his evil aide Iago into believing that his wife and a loyal deputy have betrayed him, he collapses in a psychotic rage.

Hillary has her own paranoid tendencies. Abner Mikva, one of the White House attorneys who defended the Clintons during the Starr investigations, later called Hillary “the center of paranoia” in the White House. Lanny Davis, former special counsel to the president, has tried over the years without success to counteract Hillary’s reflexes when it comes to the disclosure of anything about her—anything at all. Davis sees a tragic pattern: “One can speculate that the whole chain of events that led to the Whitewater investigation, then led to Ken Starr, which then led to the investigation of Monica and finally to impeachment can be traced back to the first Jeff Gerth New York Times story on Whitewater and the first instinct—to lock down.” Hillary’s edict was known as the “Fuck you, Jeff Gerth” strategy.

The cordon sanitaire around Hillary has guaranteed her rough treatment by top columnists. New York Times’s William Safire called her “a congenital liar,” and political writer Joe Klein nearly made her cry when he compared her to Fitzgerald’s carelessly destructive heroine Daisy Buchanan. When Hillary first started to run, a New Yorker who has helped her warned, “Look, you have one major obstacle, either you learn to deal with the press or you’ll be savaged.” The friend continued, “I offered to set up dinners, I mean I know you all, Peter and Tom and the rest, and for her not to sit down with Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw, even at a private dinner in the Hamptons … “

But why does Hillary still refuse?

The supporter sighed. “Look, she is a woman of enormous talent who loves policy, she knows how to move things politically, but is she secure? This is the most important thing to write about Hillary. That she is not a woman of inner self-confidence, as she likes to portray herself. Underneath is a very delicate defensive ego.”

Giuliani, too, is surprisingly delicate in the ego department. While he was still a U.S. attorney, I interviewed him several times. When I asked him if he had always been so self-assured, he replied with disarming candor, “I don’t know that I’m confident.”

Both of these candidates are unique. He is a political oxymoron—a hard-boiled law-and-order man who expects the worst of everybody but who has been out front favoring strict gun control and who is pro-choice all the way, even refusing to budge on “partial birth” abortion to get the Conservative Party endorsement. She is cast by the right as a lefty who promoted a socialist health-care system, but in fact she is a supporter of the death penalty and boasts of being a point person for abolishing the welfare system as we knew it.

Neither one has been on a straight political track. Mrs. Clinton has been riding her husband’s coattails for 25 years, while Mr. Giuliani never built a political career for himself until Guy Molinari recruited him at the age of 43 to run as a Republican in the ‘89 mayoral primary. While Hillary has set her heart, mind, and soul on winning a seat in the Senate as the bridge to a new life, Giuliani’s heart often does not seem to be in it. The discipline he displayed when running for mayor is not there. And some of the capos in his own party hierarchy are now kicking themselves for having dumped Congressman Lazio in favor of the volatile Giuliani. Indeed, no mayor of the Big Apple in more than a century has gone on to higher office—not La Guardia, not “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker, not John Lindsay, David Dinkins, or Ed Koch.

But even as we see these two supernovas colliding on TV day after day and New Yorkers wake up to tabloids filled with dissections of each candidate’s slightest misstep, we still don’t really know: Who are these actors?

Hillary’s guardedness is legendary. “I am a very well-known unknown person,” she admitted to the local CBS-TV news reporter Marcia Kramer. Giuliani, too, remains an enigma. He steadfastly refuses journalistic requests to be interviewed about his evolution from a Brooklyn bar owner’s son who considered becoming a priest to the Eliot Ness of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and on to the world-renowned mayor of New York City.

The mask of arrogance over their insecurities is only one of a surprising number of similarities between Rudy and Hillary. It sometimes seems they are the same person—Rudyhill. (Both declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Rudy was a restless baby who would stay awake for 48 hours at a stretch, as if he didn’t have time to waste being a child. At Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn, the Christian Brothers expected the working-class Catholic boys to dress like men—jackets and ties, no pegged pants—and they and the lay teachers addressed the boy not as Rudy but as “Mr. Giuliani.” Similarly, Hillary was born an adult, according to her mother, Dorothy Rodham. While that is surely an exaggeration, in eighth grade, when most girls are worried about how to kiss boys through their braces, Hillary was reading Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative.

Rudy’s inborn aggressiveness was channeled by his father, who bought him boxing gloves when he was two years old. Her inborn aggressiveness was channeled by her mother, who taught her to deck a bully girl when Hillary was four.

An only child, Rudy learned the street ways of the ginzoloons who frequented his father’s bar. In college politics, he played hard-ball and was livid when beaten for junior-class president by classmate Jim Farrell. Giuliani’s revenge was to participate in a smear campaign against student-council candidate Farrell in their senior year, according to Farrell, now an attorney at Colgate-Palmolive. “Giuliani is a tough guy to deal with,” he told me. “Getting along with others was not his forte.”

Similarly, Hillary was a real go-getter. At Wellesley, her only real interests were getting A’s and figuring out how to run things. Six weeks into college, she was already planning how to revamp the state Republican organization.

Both were raised by strict fathers who profoundly affected their worldviews. Rudy’s father, Harold, was known in the neighborhood as an eccentric guy who kept a bat behind his bar and threatened to break the kneecaps of anyone who made trouble. Hillary’s father, a tradesman, was the family drillmaster, an impossible person to please, according to Nancy Pietrefesa, Hillary’s pal in her 20s. “[Mr. Rodham] saw her as competition and always tried to undermine her sexuality.”

Hillary’s college boyfriend David Rupert, now a business executive, said, “There was always the perfectionist, always the ambition.” Rudy’s college girlfriend, Kathy Livermore, remembered, “He liked to say Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III, the first Italian-Catholic president of the United States.”

Both became aggressive lawyers who are willing to bend the rules and who use people and coldly discard them when it is politically expedient.

Giuliani has always attracted a tight adoring circle. During the Cristyne Lategano era, when his press secretary intimidated all comers, she and other aides such as Randy Levine were known as the “Kool-Aid Eaters.” But the mayor never lets go of a grudge. Says Rudy Crew, “You’re either friend or enemy, in league or out of league.”

Hillary is genuinely attentive to her friends and staff, but she expects the same blind loyalty. The sure way to be in Hillary’s inner circle is to “show a balls-out, go-to-the-mat mentality about taking on their enemies,” I was told by a former White House speechwriter who remains a supporter of the Clintons’. “Anybody who has a hang-up about fairness is cast out as part of the enemy camp.”

Rudy’s and Hillary’s minds work in much the same way. “They’re both highly intelligent, with analytical minds, both strong and stubborn—‘determined’ is a nice way to put it,” says Don Baer, a former attorney who worked with Giuliani and served the Clintons as White House communications director. A Republican congressman says, “Rudy is always five or six moves ahead of the game—he thinks like a chess player.” Hillary was only 26 when she announced to her boss, Bernard Nussbaum, that her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, would become president of the United States.

Politically, both made drastic adjustments to their youthful ideals. She is a Republican turned Democrat. He is a Democrat turned Republican. (Both, however, voted for George McGovern in ‘72.) Giuliani hated Nixon, calling him “the Trickster.” He even ridiculed as a lightweight Ronald Reagan (who hosted the 60s-era TV Western series Death Valley Days, sponsored by Borax), calling him “Boraxo.” When the curtain rose on the next act of the good Catholic boy’s life, however, idealism was absent; given the opportunity to work for President Ford’s Justice Department, Giuliani switched parties in the blink of a calculating eye.

Giuliani passed out flyers for Bobby Kennedy in ‘64; four years later, Hillary was tapped as an intern to work on Capitol Hill for hawkish Republican congressman Melvin Laird. She was also the sash-wearing Goldwater Girl who came down against Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for community action against poverty in her senior thesis, now sealed at Wellesley College. In her famous commencement address there, Hillary used as a foil Senator Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote. Still feeling the sting 30 years later, Brooke told me, “She was to the right of me! I was a Rockefeller Republican, and Hillary was a Goldwater Republican.”

In 1996, after a quarter-century of defending the safety net for poor mothers and children through her work with the Children’s Defense Fund, Hillary coolly parted with her mentor C.D.F. founder Marian Wright Edelman, and now boasts, “I was the point person on welfare reform with a lot of the advocates’ groups”—which helped Bill Clinton capture a second term.

Today, there is probably not more than six degrees of separation between the politics of the two candidates.

“They are both driven by personal-responsibility politics,” says Don Baer. “It’s at the heart of what they do.” Both strongly favor rules and restrictions governing gun ownership. Both want schools held to strict accountability and favor teacher testing, although Hillary is committed to improving public-school education, while Giuliani favors taking $6 million out of the city schools budget to provide for vouchers to private schools. Both believe in ending welfare by rewarding work, although neither seems to be in touch with the reality that New York’s workfare rules keep many homeless people trapped in menial jobs.

Both see the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. As a young man Rudy agonized over the choice of becoming a priest or not. Politics was not considered, because “Rudy’s father taught him at a young age to have disdain for politicians,” says Elliot Cuker. “He felt they were full of it.”

His closest boyhood friend, Alan Placa, now a monsignor, is often asked why he and Rudy chose such different paths. “We didn’t,” he told me pointedly. When Giuliani was U.S. attorney, he told me, “I think I do use it as a pulpit. To alert society and political systems to changes that have to be made.” Congressman King explains the code among young men who came out of Catholic schools in the 50s and 60s: “If you did something in life that was going to get you fame or notoriety, you had to justify it morally. Not just to win the election, not only for the good of the people. You have to go above that and say that you are defeating evil.”

Hillary thinks of herself as a “moral Methodist” with the burden of helping people less fortunate. On a single day in March, Hillary seized the White House bully pulpit to inveigh against overmedicating children and stood in the actual pulpit of a Harlem church promising to unite New Yorkers against a racially divisive mayor.

Both are emotionally closed down, sometimes handicapped by a disconnect between head and heart.

Typically, when Giuliani faced 200 disgruntled community members at a town-hall meeting in Hollis, Queens, this February, he ignored their emotional appeals to reconsider the construction of a temporary minor-league baseball stadium in their backyard. “You’re not going to get me to change my mind by yelling at me,” he declared. “In fact, you’ll make me more convinced that I’m doing the right thing.” Then came the kicker: “And you can vote against me, I don’t care. You can vote for Hillary.” Dr. Barry Weinberg, the spokesman for a coalition against the stadium, attempted to calm the agitated mayor, shouting, “But Rudy, we love you!”

In a letter she wrote from college to her youth minister, Hillary described herself as “a heart liberal, but a mind conservative.” Her ability to fool everyone about her true feelings is formidable. Immediately after the Clintons’ famous 1998 vacation from hell on Martha’s Vineyard, when Hillary supposedly wouldn’t speak to her husband, the president and First Lady were expected to join a half-dozen members of Congress on Air Force One for what some expected would be a long, tense flight to Moscow. Congressman King recalls his amazement: “They were holding hands, telling jokes, laughing. Usually people are friendly in public and fight in private. They were fighting in public, but they couldn’t be more friendly on the plane. They were totally a normal, happy couple.” But the couple arrived separately at their next stop, in Northern Ireland, where I was up close to see Hillary resume the façade of icy disdain; whenever the president tried to move close to her in public, she repelled him.

Neither Hillary nor Rudy finds it easy to admit mistakes. Ed Koch advised Hillary to make health care one of her top issues as a Senate candidate: “I told her she has to apologize that she fucked it up the first time [her failed 1994 initiative].” But when Hillary announced her new ideas on health-care reform last February, the closest she came to admitting her previous failure was to say, “You may recall I had a few things to say about health care in 1993 and 1994. And we did some work then, but we learned a lot about what we needed to do.”

Giuliani’s obduracy may be helping Hillary to humanize herself. She did own up to a mistaken reference to the killing of Amadou Diallo as “murder” (when the trial jury hadn’t yet rendered a verdict), a slipup made when she met the mother of the African immigrant. By contrast, the mayor has stuck adamantly to his condemnation of Dorismond, charging that the dead man may have “[begun] the violence and caused his own death.”

And finally, both have marriages held together by the delicate threads of political expediency. “Donna and Rudy got along well in 1995 … in ‘96 there was some tension,” says a former mayoral aide. “After that, the lights went out. We were told by Cristyne Lategano never to call Donna again.” Why does Hanover hang on, when the mayor no longer even wears his wedding ring and she has a thriving career as an actress and TV personality? The aide’s best guess is “She has title, privilege, full use of the mansion”—and four paid assistants. In June, Hanover will appear as a star of the controversial Off Broadway hit The Vagina Monologues, in which the lines call for her to expound in detail about “my vagina.” The playwright, Eve Ensler, is an ardent Giuliani-basher. (The mayor, according to the New York Post, is unlikely to attend.)

Bill Clinton needs Hillary as his legacy. They have reversed roles. He can’t help quarterbacking her campaign to fill the void in his own political life, even throwing the equivalent of a punch at his wife’s attackers when he declared her the target of a “right-wing venom machine” allied with Giuliani. Having cut off Arkansas by planning to register to vote in his wife’s adopted state, he isn’t going to see a Clinton library built anytime soon. But friends cannot picture the ex-president sitting in a suburban den waiting for Senator Clinton to come home and drag him off to a rubber-chicken dinner in Ronkonkoma.

In sum, Rudy and Hillary are both ruthless personal pragmatists who will stop at almost nothing to win their points and get ahead. And both have the dream of ultimately becoming president of the United States.

The first-act curtain on this opera came down with the startling revelation announced by Mayor Giuliani on April 27 that he has prostate cancer. This plot twist elicited an equally startling response from a City Hall insider immediately following the press conference. “This was the best news he’s had in months,” said the man. “It humanizes him.” The spin was this would create a win-win situation, politically, for Giuliani. If the second act opens with his declaration that he will stay in the race, his poll numbers will predictably shoot up, as then Mayor Koch’s did in 1987 when Koch had a stroke. Alternatively, says the insider, “Now Rudy has an easy way out, without looking like he’s backing away from a fight.”

As this riveting drama unfolds, the resolution may lie less in politics than in the personalities and personal decisions of the two extraordinary lead players.